MILTON – Selectman Denis Keohane has seen and heard the planes low and loud over East Milton, headed toward Runway 22-4 at Logan Airport or into the skies from runway 33L-15R.

"I couldn’t hear myself think,” Keohane said.

Miles to the south, Milton resident Muna Killingback has heard them, too, while hiking in the Blue Hills Reservation.

“It’s not as peaceful and quiet as it used to be,” she said.

She and Keohane are among many in town who say both the noise level and frequency of low-altitude planes have risen dramatically since the Federal Aviation Administration changed the flight paths for arrivals and departures at Logan in June 2013.

After a year escalating complaints – and growing concerns that the flights also pose health risks – town officials have formed an official committee to take their call for fewer flights to Massport and the FAA.

Keohane is on the 10-person Airplane Noise Advisory Committee. So is Killingback, along with other residents, health officials and Milton’s representative on Massport’s citizens advisory committee.

The new town committee was chosen by the selectmen and board of health. The group hasn’t held its first meeting. It will report to selectmen and the health board twice a year.

Massport spokeswoman Jennifer Mehigan noted that Milton is one of more than 30 communities that are part of a noise study that’s being conducted by Logan Airport, the FAA and Massport’s community advisory committee.

“Aircraft noise is a regional issue and therefore any approach needs to be regionally based,” Mehigan said. She said the goal of the study is to determine if noise from flights can be more evenly spread out “while not adversely impacting any one community.”

She also noted that the FAA, not Massport, decides how runways will be used, based on wind, weather conditions and other factors.

Milton has now joined Hull in making a more vocal official protest of plane effects. Hull’s past efforts succeeded in reducing the frequency of flights over the town.

Keohane and Town Administrator Annemarie Fagin say the committee will follow up on the effort started last year by the grassroots group Milton Citizens Against Aviation Impact.

They say they hope to persuade Massport and the FAA to resume the previous, wider flight paths, “to make sure the pains are shared among all communities,” Fagin said.

For Keohane, that means looping as many flights as possible out over Massachusetts Bay, and at a higher altitude over Milton. For Killingback, as for Fagin, it means “everybody should get a little bit, but nobody should get a lot” – a reference to surrounding communities.

Page 2 of 2 - Last year the FAA concentrated southbound departures from runway 33L-15R into a 3-mile-wide path over parts of Milton, Canton and Randolph. Those flights had previously been spread across a wider swath of the South Shore.

At that time, Massport’s deputy director of aviation planning, Flavio Leo, said that change would increase the number of departures over Milton from 4,000 to about 4,700 annually, and that hundreds fewer Milton residents would be affected. He also said the planes on those flights would be at higher altitudes.

Keohane and the others say the Runway 4 arrivals seem to have increased as well. In any event, the number of Milton complaints logged by Massport has risen dramatically.

In May 2013, the month before the runway 33L change, Massport reported 70 complaints from Milton. In June of this year there were 407 – 40 percent of the 1,093 complaints Logan Airport got from Boston and 39 surrounding communities all month. (Hull accounted for 124, the second highest number.)

“It’s a convenience for them but a terrible problem for us,” Keohane said.

Lane Lambert may be reached at llambert@ledger.com or follow him on Twitter @LLambert_Ledger.